British Workers in France, 1815-1848*

Abstract

In spite of the growing interest in ‘connected histories’, exchanges between France and its neighbours and between Britain and western Europe are seldom explored at an ‘intermediary’ level — between the local level of town, county, regional or national history, and the universal level of global or world history. This is particularly true for the early industrialization period, before the mass migrations of the 1880s and later. The emigration of several thousand British workers to France in the first half of the nineteenth century, however, enables a case study. These migrants are not unknown to economic and technical historians, in particular those of specific industrial sectors and areas or factories,1 but they have not attracted much attention as a social and cultural phenomenon. Although in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries France was the premier European country in terms of immigration, immigrants were not integrated into the narrative of the construction of French national identity, in the tradition which extended down to the work of Fernand Braudel.2 Yet, since the 1980s, immigration has increasingly been a subject of public debate, and following a seminal book by Gérard Noiriel there has been a growing interest in the history of immigration, now a recognized sub-field of the discipline, as illustrated by the opening of the museum ‘Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration’ in Paris in 2008.3 Most ongoing research focuses on the period of mass industrial immigr…